Life in France seen through the round window of a straw-built grand design.

Willkommen Bienvenue Welcome

Welcome, gentle readers.

This is an everyday tale of regular folk, who moved from Sheffield to the deepest Corrèze in France Profonde and thence to the rather more cosmopolitan Lot in search of something… different. We certainly found it.

The Lot is an area of outstanding natural beauty. Reputedly, a famous TV globetrotter was asked where, of all the places in the world he had visited, he might return to. He answered, ‘The Lot’.

Fans of Channel 4’s Grand Designs will know that we built a somewhat quirky straw bale house-with-a-view here in the Lot, not far from the celebrated Dordogne river. You can read all about it in my book, Bloody Murder On The Dog's Meadow, or watch the re-runs of the programme on More 4, or view it on You Tube.

After a break in the proceedings to write a book or two, this blog now takes the form of an everyday journal. Sometimes things happen, sometimes they don't (but the art school dance goes on forever). I hope it will give you an entertaining insight into what it's like to live in a foreign country; what it's like in the slow lane as an ex-pat Brit in deepest France.

I shall undertake to update this once or twice a week, unless absent on leave. Comments always welcomed, by the way, but I do tend to forget what buttons to click in order to answer them.

Sunday, September 22, 2013

Heading South

We’re heading south soon, the
wife and I – not because we’re a pair of migratory birds at heart, but because
a friend is celebrating his 60th birthday. And it’s not just any old
friend, or any old birthday. This is one of our very first friends here in
France; we go back nearly 18 years. It’s important that we’re there because this
particular friend – a very kind, but vaguely troubled soul – was diagnosed with
Alzheimer’s a couple of years ago.

I remember my first perplexing brush
with premature Alzheimer’s. I was 19 at the time, working in a stately home as
an assistant archivist during my year off between school and university. It
wasn’t the earl himself, a seriously eccentric octogenarian, given to writing
little messages (or billets doux, as
he called them) on scraps of old envelopes in spidery handwriting that had to
be deciphered by his permanent secretary. It was the mother of a school friend.

I’d travelled north from Stafford to
Liverpool and caught the boat across the Irish Sea to Belfast. It was the first
trip back after the family’s return to England, so I was excited about seeing
my girlfriend of the time and a whole host of old chums. (And what a splendid
word ‘chum’ is: another word, like ‘wireless’ and ‘charabanc’ that’s crying out
for a revival.) Ian and his brother David lived on the other side of the back
entry that divided our two parallel tree-lined avenues. My kid brother and I
would blow up old Airfix model airplanes with them and play two-a-side ‘binball’
in the car park of the architects’ practice, so-called because we used dustbins
turned on their sides as goals.

Ian wasn’t in when I called round –
after being kicked out of my girlfriend’s house by her mum when she caught us
snogging on the parental bed – and his dad let it be known with equivocal looks
and vague asides that something was up with his wife. On the way to the loo, I
bumped into her in a dark corner of the house where the boys used to hang their
coats after getting back from school. She said not a word and smiled strangely
at me, and her far-away look suggested that she’d gone off with the fairies.

With a start and a sense of foreboding, I recognised that same look
in our friend last time that he and his wife dropped by to see us when they
were staying with old friends in the Corrèze. Everyone at the time was looking for logical
reasons for his forgetfulness and his strange behaviour. He had, after all, a
quite high-powered job and stress went with the territory. But by the time I
witnessed that vacant look, it was clear enough that the game was up.

Once the diagnosis was confirmed, he took
early retirement and they moved south from Paris to somewhere near Avignon,
whence they had started out together on their professional peregrinations. We
met them when he was based in Tulle and his wife was the institutrice at our daughter’s first school in the next village
from our former home, in the Corrèze. She was – and probably still is – a creative
teacher and a great motivator of young children. In some ways, Tilley couldn’t
have had a better start to her education, but she and her mother have
subsequently discovered – in sessions to explore the roots of the psychological
trauma that the French system has inadvertently created in her – that it was
precisely this start that triggered the mental blocks, which consistently
stopped her believing in herself. When she turned up at école maternelle, she found that everyone spoke a language that she
couldn’t. Some children, blessed with a precociously positive spin on life,
might have told themselves that they were unique, because they could speak a
language that no one else could. But our daughter learnt that she was different
and wasn’t up to it, and so spent the rest of her schooling trying to convince
everyone in her reticent way that she was indeed worthy.

Anyway, our friend’s wife was also my wife’s
first aromatherapy client, so she helped get the ball rolling in more ways than
one. Unfortunately, they didn’t stay long in Tulle. Our friend was transferred
to Toulouse and thence to Montluçon, a God-foresaken dive on the northern edge
of the Massif Central, before winding up his career in Paris. We’ve kept in
touch and enjoyed many of those magic mo-ments
that Perry Como sung about: his 50th birthday among a host of fans
and admirers at the converted school house they co-own on the Atlantic coast; we
sole Brits cooking vegetarian curries for all the assembled die-hard
meat-eaters; applauding a big red summer sun as it slipped gradually away
behind the horizon over dinner al fresco at a beach-side café; a perilous kayak
trip down a rocky half-empty river during the canicule of 2003; a guided tour of the Marais in Paris; his tales
of Tipitina and the other clubs he visited to imbibe the music of New Orleans
during a youthful road trip around America.

So it’s going to be a poignant affair, as
we haven’t yet witnessed the deterioration that has taken place during the two
years since their last visit. The contrast between his 50th and 60th
bashes will be stark. Since music is still something that strikes a chord, we’ll
go bearing some T-Bone Walker and a nice compilation of New Orleans R&B,
but whether he’ll know that it’s from us – or even remember who we are –
remains to be seen.

It’s a long way south to Avignon and
another salutary reminder of what a big country France is. Still, the journey
will give me my first opportunity to see Norman Foster’s monumental bridge
that spans the Tarn at Millau. It’s the first time I’ll have driven down the
A75, which runs south from Clermont Ferrand to Montpelier and Bézier across the
wind-blasted heaths of the Massif, for what seems like an eternity. Last time,
our daughter was a tot in the back of the car, and we drove down to visit some
celebrated author and aromatherapist whom Debs met at a conference in
Sheffield. We were received in the elegant mas
where she lived and practised. We came away somewhat frustrated with
non-specific advice that amounted to something like, If you build it, they will come. The rest, as they say...

Stopping briefly at a service station to
stretch our limbs in the dead of night half way back across the blasted Massif,
I vividly remember an almost ghostly sensation of geographical emptiness. Since
then a lot of water has flown over the
bridge, as Mr. Malaprop, an ex-boss of mine in the Civil Surface, was given
to say. All that temporal distance may
no longer register in the mind of our friend, but it certainly will with his
wife, his beloved son and daughter, and all his many friends who will be
gathered to celebrate another milestone on the way to our common destination.

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Camp Street

About Me

Born in London, raised in Belfast, further-educated at Exeter and Sussex universities, I'm a professional dilettante, a family man and tireless dog-walker. You can listen to Lost & Found, my monthly radio show on www.expatsradio.com and check out my author page on Amazon.